Behind the scenes of Monkey Beach

By Brittany Tiplady
@yellowbird888

In 2017, The Vancouver International Film Festival opened with Mina Shum’s Meditation Park. The film was met with roaring enthusiasm—to see a familiar, local story on screen, emboldened by iconic Canadian talent was a monumental moment for theatre goers.

In 2020, I suspect VIFF audiences will be met with the same level of delight, as the world premiere of Monkey Beach is set to open the festival this year on their new online streaming platform, VIFF connect.  

Monkey Beach is adapted to the big screen from a novel of the same name, written by Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations author Eden Robinson.

2020 is a big year for Robinson: Monkey Beach is her first novel to be adapted into a film and to boot, her book Son of a Trickster has been made into the much-anticipated six-part series Trickster, airing on CBC next month.

The film’s director Loretta Sarah Todd, aspired to see this project come to fruition for many years.

“As a filmmaker, I am always watching films and looking at how they told their stories and the land that they come from. I don’t come from Kitamaat, I am Metis and Cree, so how do I relate from the ways in which my stories come from my land? How can I find a way to honour all that is specific to this story?” Todd shares. “I think that was my challenge as a filmmaker…[learning] how to give myself freedom to explore and not be confined to what I have to do for this to be a ‘native story.’ It had to be from the ground up for these people and this place.”

Monkey Beach follows the story of Lisa (Grace Dove), a young woman living in East Vancouver. She is urged by a familiar spirit, who visits her in a dream, to leave her dangerous life behind and return home to Kitamaat territory. But Lisa has a gift—one that was fostered through the teachings of her grandmother. Once she reconnects to her family, we learn more about the complicated relationship she has to her kin, and herself, as her childhood visions powerfully return. 

“Lisa’s love for her family is almost heartbreaking,” says Todd. That love is palpable through the screen between Lisa and her brother Jimmy (Trickster star Joel Oulette). 

“I think that’s something that often non-Indigenous people don’t realize is that we are very strong family-oriented, despite all the things that have broken up our families, from residential school to poverty to laws over the years. There are all these layers of colonization and legislation that have been designed to basically break up our families, but we love them. Even if they are dysfunctional, that strong family presence is still so prevalent.” 

The unsung hero of this story however, is the film’s stunning backdrop of Kitamaat; rich with vast northern coastlines and luscious greenery—a stunning contrast to Lisa’s opening scenes in Eat Van. 

“We scouted around [Vancouver], but it never felt right. I felt it had to come from the place that the story is from,” says Todd. That also brings redistribution of wealth and reciprocity to the village. It wasn’t just going to some abstract location in Vancouver, so that it could have a real impact on the community. I tried to hire people from the community, as much as possible.”

And although Monkey Beach is a story about family, it’s also a deeply intimate illustration of a feminist’s journey to self-actualization.

“Lisa herself she’s a badass, and yet she’s really shy. She’s compassionate, yet she can push back against bullies. There are very few young woman characters in literature that have that complexity in the world, let alone Canada,” adds Todd.

“I kept coming back to this idea of Lisa being this person who possesses this great medicine and how to come to terms with that. There have been people like Lisa for hundreds of thousands of years and there will always be people who possess these great gifts. In the end, that’s what I had to focus on, was her going on that journey.”

Monkey Beach opens the Vancouver International Film Festival screening on VIFF Connect on Thursday, September 24. Select in-person screenings are available through out the festival. Get your tickets here.

Brittany Tiplady is a writer, editor, former ballet teacher, and the co-founder of Loose Lips Magazine. She loves the indoors, fast wifi, collecting maps, and a generous glass of red wine. She’s a self-proclaimed wizard of time management and a notorious loud talker with a penchant for all things Internet and pop culture.